A blog by Jonathan Eggers

Finding the Server Address in Office 365

When Microsoft upgraded Office 365 from Exchange 2010 to Exchange 2013 they also changed Outlook profile server addressing. In the older version of Office 365 your Outlook profile server address was the same as the URL for Outlook Web Access. This made it particularly easy to determine any user’s server address. So, if your OWA address was https://ppod51038.outlook.com/owa/, the address used for your Outlook profile was pod51038.mailbox.outlook.com.

However, in the new Office 365 each user has their own specific address that is unique to their mailbox. The address is typically 36 random letters, numbers, and dashes followed by @domain.com.

Old Office 365

Usually none of this would matter – Autodiscover would configure Outlook automatically with the correct server settings for you. However, during an Office 365 migration it is sometimes necessary to pre-configure Outlook profiles for Office 365, but you cannot use autodiscover to do so because autodiscover is still needed for the existing Exchange environment.

There are two ways to find the new Office 365 server address. The first works well for finding the address of a single user – more than 1 or 2 and it’s inefficient. However, it requires you to have the password for the account you want to look up and submit that password to a (Microsoft owned) website.

Enter the account information you’re looking up and click Next After the test runs, expand Test Steps at the bottom of the list. The list will keep expanding – but keep scrolling to the bottom and expand the last item until you get to “The Microsoft Connectivity Analyzer is attempting to retrieve an XML Autodiscover response”

Expand Additional Details and search for <server>. There, between the <server></server> tags you will find your server address

The more efficient way of finding the address, which doesn’t require you to submit an account password to a website, and allows you to retrieve server addresses for all users in an organization, is as follows (this method requires admin credentials):

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